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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Samuel Richardson
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(1689–1761) Author whose use of letters as the medium for story-telling greatly extended the psychological range of the early novel. He had an immediate success with Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), in which the majority of the letters are written by Pamela herself, a 15-year-old maid who wards off the sexual designs of the young man of the house (including attempted rape and a mock marriage) until her virtue is at last rewarded with a genuine wedding ring. The book's somewhat scheming notion of virtue and its rewards had an excellent side-effect in provoking Henry *Fielding to attempt fiction.
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The much darker Clarissa (7 vols, 1747–8, and at more than a million words the longest novel in the English language) investigates similar pressures through the letters to their respective confidants of two upper-class characters, Clarissa Harlowe and Richard Lovelace. After hundreds of pages of failed attempts to have his way with Clarissa, Lovelace eventually drugs and rapes her. Clarissa goes mad for a while but recovers before declining to a slow death; Lovelace is killed by her cousin in a duel.
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